I take the idea of transcendence quite seriously in that certain experiences I have had in my life seem to have, if only for a fleeting moment or a fleeting few hours, caused me to become something greater than my human being.
Being can become greater than itself. Humans, as a particular type of being, are perfectly capable of transcendence and transcending the particular form and minds we have come to believe are static and necessary.
We can, in at least some sense, commune with god or the great creative computer that outputs and shapes worlds.
Assumptions and ignorance about what the word "god" could refer to, for example, lead us to have a negative intellectual disposition towards any mention of god. But, even Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, makes the point early on that he has no qualms with an abstract pantheistic conception of deity or god.
This may not seem like a very grounded or analytic way of putting transcendence to many readers. However, there seems no better way to put it that to transcend one's self is to become something more than you were before.
A memory of the transcendence, like a memory of intense love or depression, can never be as bright a representation as when it happened.
Though, remnants of the transcendent experience can remain with the being that became more and, in keeping this grains of realizations that are beyond normal contemplative capacity, we can become, ever so slighly or ever so completely, something more than we were before.
My grandmother taught me transcendental meditation when I was about twelve years old and it never occurred to me until much later that the methods of meditation and, in later years, shamanistic psychonautic exploration, could yield experiences that no words could ever easily convey.
To leave this reality and find one's being in a new and profoundly sublime place shatters the before held beliefs that this body and this mind are limited and prison-like. Rather, we can expand our consciousness indefinitely.
We can rejoin the creative force and creative source of this world that is an infinite mind. I found that there was not a god. I found that, instead, there was only god.
There is no limit to what humans can become. There is no boundaries to the mind when it is set free to explore the wonderous transcendent reality that is purely infinite and loving.
The world we think we are bound to- the body, death, suffering, and all that makes us question the divinity of this place, can all be shed like an old and worn out skin to reveal a more beautiful and welcoming place that we all occupy at all times but are blind to because of our attachments, our hungers, our desires, and our lack of knowledge of just how to break the bonds of the material world.
Many become so mired in this paradigm that they see the idea of transcendence as useless and baseless; as a meaningless term for those who have deluded themselves into thinking that a substance or a jhanic level of meditation (of which there are eight; four material and four more immaterial, in Buddhist meditational philosophy) could possibly yield anything worth pursuing.
There is no proof of transcendence, at least not in an absolute sense.
There is only the possibility of it for each being that decides to venture into a world that can only be explored when fear is put aside and replaced with a philosophical curiosity and open-minded, child-like desire and belief that the world may be as magical as we once thought when we were young.
The loss of this child-like belief that anything is possible is precisely where we lose the ability to venture to transcendent worlds where words can not begin to explain the awesomeness of them.
